Civil Rights

Pharr, TX

On February 6, 1971, a protest against police discrimination and brutality outside the Pharr Police Department swelled into a confrontation that turned deadly when an officer's gunfire killed bystander Alfonso Loredo Flores. In the weeks that followed, groups like Union y Fuerza picketed city hall and boycotted local businesses, drawing national attention to the Rio Grande Valley. The pressure forced the resignation of the mayor, commissioners, and police chief, and in 1972 Pharr elected its first Mexican American mayor.

Indiana, PA · est. 2002

In June 1845, slave hunters seized a twelve-year-old fugitive named Anthony Hollingsworth and held him in an Indiana, Pennsylvania hotel. Armed townspeople surrounded the building and demanded his release, openly defying the federal laws that protected slave catchers. Judge Thomas White then freed the boy in the courthouse that once stood on this site, a striking act of local conscience against the machinery of slavery.

Houston, TX

Born in Alabama around 1861, the Rev. Ned P. Pullum became a leading Baptist minister in Houston's Freedmen's Town, the Fourth Ward community founded by the formerly enslaved after emancipation. He pastored Bethel Baptist after the death of the Rev. John "Jack" Yates, then founded Friendship Missionary Baptist Church in 1903, leading it for 24 years. A civic force and entrepreneur, he helped establish the segregation-era Carnegie Colored Library, supported a Black-run hospital, and built businesses including a brickworks, a shoe-repair shop, and two drugstores.

East Taylor Township, PA

On September 7, 1923, amid rising racial hostility, Johnstown Mayor Joseph Cauffiel ordered every Black and Mexican resident who had lived in the area less than seven years to leave. By some accounts more than 2,000 people were driven out under threat of jail. The episode drew national attention—much of it from Black journalists and activists—prompting a state investigation and a public backlash that helped cost Cauffiel his reelection.

Galveston, TX

Ohio-born priest James Martin Kirwin arrived in Galveston in 1896 and quickly became one of the island's most trusted civic leaders. After the catastrophic 1900 hurricane—the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history—he helped form the Committee for Public Safety and, alongside his friend Rabbi Henry Cohen, drove the city's rebuilding, from the great Seawall to labor peace on the docks. In the 1920s he took a public stand against the Ku Klux Klan.

Austin, TX

Born in China in 1860, Joe Sing immigrated to the United States around 1890 to support his family and became one of Austin's first Chinese residents, opening the Hong Lee Laundry with his wife Francis, a Mexican-American woman who lost her U.S. citizenship simply for marrying him. Facing discrimination that shut Chinese men out of ordinary credit, Sing quietly financed loans that helped sustain the city's small Chinese community. His daughter Margaret later became the family's first homeowner on this property.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2025

In 1868 a young immigrant domestic worker named Hester Vaughn was convicted of infanticide by an all-male jury in Philadelphia and sentenced to hang. Reformers of the Working Women's Association and the suffrage movement seized on the case, arguing that a woman tried without any women on her jury had been denied a jury of her peers. Their campaign persuaded Governor John Geary to pardon her and turned a single verdict into a national argument about justice and women's rights.

Austin, TX

For half a century Texas women organized, petitioned, and lobbied for the ballot, from the first suffrage bill filed in 1868 to a cascade of associations that culminated in the Texas Equal Suffrage Association. Their breakthrough came in March 1918, when the legislature granted women the vote in primary elections and more than 386,000 rushed to register in just seventeen days. On June 28, 1919, Texas became the first Southern state and the ninth in the nation to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

San Antonio, TX

In 1898 philanthropist Eleanor Brackenridge and journalist Marin B. Fenwick gathered eighteen women to form the Woman's Club of San Antonio—the first departmental club in Texas. Brackenridge led it for seven years as it pressed for women's suffrage and education, social reform, and the arts. In 1926 the club made its home in a handsome 1907–08 residence built for civic leader David J. Woodward.

Temple, TX

Born in Hearne in 1890, Dr. Thomas Edison Dixon trained at Meharry Medical College and by 1927 had brought his practice to downtown Temple, where health care for African Americans was scarce. Devoted to pediatrics and obstetrics, "Tommy" Dixon also anchored the community's Black churches and civic groups, sold land cheaply to the city for schools, and contributed to the NAACP's 1954 "Fighting Fund for Freedom" against racial discrimination. At his death he was the only African American physician practicing in Bell County.

Upper Darby, PA · est. 2007

Thomas Garrett was born at Riverview in Delaware County and became one of the most fearless conductors on the Underground Railroad. A devout Quaker who moved to Wilmington in 1822, he funneled freedom seekers northward to family properties, working alongside Harriet Tubman and William Still. Though convicted and heavily fined under the fugitive slave laws, he never relented—by his own account aiding some 2,700 people on their journey out of slavery.

Louisville, KY

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, poet, and spiritual writer, entered the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1941 and won international acclaim with his 1948 autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. At this Louisville corner on March 18, 1958, he experienced a sudden revelation—an overwhelming love for the strangers around him, "shining like the sun"—that reoriented his monastic life toward the world and its struggles for social justice.

Morristown, NJ

This was the Morristown home of Thomas Nast, the most influential American political cartoonist of the 19th century, who lived here at the height of his fame. From the pages of Harper's Weekly his pen helped bring down the corrupt Tweed Ring that ran New York City, and he popularized two enduring symbols of American politics — the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant. Nast is also credited with shaping the familiar modern image of a jolly, round Santa Claus.

Louisville, KY

Thornton and Lucie Blackburn were enslaved in Louisville in the early 1830s, and when Lucie was sold away the couple escaped north by steamboat. Reclaimed by their owners in Detroit two years later, they were freed in the dramatic "Blackburn Riots of 1833" and fled across the border to Canada, where two extradition attempts failed. In Toronto they founded Upper Canada's first taxi service while continuing to aid other freedom seekers.

Annapolis, MD

This memorial in Maryland's capital honors Thurgood Marshall, the Baltimore-born lawyer who became the twentieth century's foremost architect of civil-rights law. As lead counsel for the NAACP he argued and won Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, dismantling the legal basis for segregated schools, and in 1967 he became the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Placing his likeness in Annapolis roots that national story in the state that shaped him.

Fort Worth, TX

Timothy Brian Cole, an Army veteran and Texas Tech student, was wrongly convicted of assault in 1986 and sentenced to 25 years, refusing every offer of freedom that required a false confession. He died in prison in 1999, still maintaining his innocence, and only years later did DNA evidence and another man's confession clear his name. In 2009 a Texas court declared him innocent, the state enacted the Tim Cole Act to compensate the wrongly convicted, and in 2010 the governor issued Texas's first posthumous pardon.

Palestine, TX

Born in 1902 to a father who had escaped slavery, Timothy Stephen Smith earned a degree from Prairie View A&M and taught school for forty-two years. Convinced that Anderson County's voting boundaries diluted Black political strength, he and others sued in 1973; Judge William Wayne Justice agreed, striking down a "racially motivated gerrymander" and forcing a switch to single-member districts. Similar success against the City of Palestine soon followed, opening the way for the county's first Black officeholders.

Boston, MA

This plaque honors Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr., the Cambridge-born son of Boston's Irish Catholic community who rose to become one of the most powerful figures in 20th-century American politics. A New Deal Democrat, he served for decades in the U.S. House of Representatives and held the Speaker's gavel from 1977 to 1987, sparring famously with the Reagan White House while defending Great Society social programs. He is perhaps best remembered for the maxim that came to define his craft: "all politics is local."

San Mateo County, CA

This memorial honors Congressman Tom Lantos (1928–2008), the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to the U.S. Congress. Born in Hungary, Lantos survived Nazi persecution as a teenager before emigrating to the United States, and he represented this San Francisco Bay Area district for 28 years. As chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, he became one of Washington's most forceful voices for human rights around the world.

Toms River, NJ

On the morning of September 11, 2001, coordinated terrorist attacks struck the United States, bringing down the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center and killing thousands of people from communities across the country. New Jersey — whose shore towns and suburbs send tens of thousands of commuters into Manhattan each day — was among the hardest-hit states, and Toms River was one of many Ocean County communities to grieve neighbors who never came home. In the years that followed, towns like this one raised quiet memorials so the date carved here, and the lives behind it, would stay part of local memory.

Trinidad, TX

First known as Trinity Switch for its spot on the Trinity River, the town became Trinidad in 1880 and opened its first school—a log hut—in 1888. Through a series of consolidations, new buildings and the arrival of the TP&L power plant in 1925, the district grew into the Trinidad Independent School District, adding a gymnasium in 1952 and a 1954 regional football championship. In 1965 the school board integrated Trinidad's schools across all grades.

Norwalk, CT

In the years after World War II, American towns embraced the young United Nations as a symbol of hope for a more peaceful world, and Norwalk joined that spirit on October 25, 1958, dedicating a living tree in the organization's honor. The gesture came just over a decade after the UN's founding in 1945 and its 1948 adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an era when "UN Day" ceremonies and plantings were a common civic ritual across the country. Choosing a tree rather than stone made the tribute a growing thing, meant to endure and flourish alongside the ideals it honored.

Lewisburg, PA · est. 1954

This old stable served as a station on the Underground Railroad, the secret network of safe houses that helped enslaved people escape north toward freedom in the decades before the Civil War. Here freedom seekers were hidden, fed, and helped on their way to the next station in a chain that stretched, hand to hand, toward Canada. Aiding fugitives was dangerous and illegal work, carried out quietly by people who risked prosecution to defy slavery.

Harrisburg, PA · est. 2000

In the 1850s a Harrisburg neighborhood known as Tanner's Alley served as a vital link on the Underground Railroad. Freedom seekers found shelter a block apart in the homes of Joseph Bustill and William Jones, while the nearby Wesley Union AME Zion Church hosted the era's fiercest voices against slavery—Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison both spoke there. It was a hub of Black community and antislavery organizing on the road north.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 2003

In the years before the Civil War, the mountainous country around Chambersburg sheltered a network of Underground Railroad stations where people fleeing slavery could pause on their journey north. One local agent was Henry Watson, a free Black barber who helped guide fugitives past the slave-catchers and bounty hunters hunting them. His work turned an ordinary trade into a lifeline to freedom.

Lisbon, IL

Founded in 1835-36 by abolitionists who had migrated west from Oneida County, New York, the Lisbon Colony carried the fervor of the burning-over district's reform movements onto the Illinois prairie. These settlers made their community an active center of the anti-slavery cause, part of the network of sympathizers who resisted slavery in the decades before the Civil War.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1993

Chartered in 1935 after African-American musicians were shut out of Philadelphia's white musicians' union, Local 274 became a home and advocate for Black performers. Its rolls included giants of modern jazz such as John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, whose innovations reshaped American music. When it dissolved in 1971, it was the last predominantly Black local of the American Federation of Musicians in the country.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2012

Organized in 1908, Local 471 of the American Federation of Musicians was one of Pennsylvania's first African American musicians' unions, giving Black performers a foothold in an industry that often shut them out. As Pittsburgh became a powerhouse of the mid-century jazz world, the local counted greats like Mary Lou Williams, Art Blakey, Ray Brown, and George Benson among its members. A contentious merger with the white local in the 1960s ended one of the oldest Black union organizations in the country.

Jefferson, TX

In 1842 Captain William Perry deeded land to local enslaved people to establish a place of worship, and a sanctuary raised here in 1847 stands among the earliest Black churches in Texas. After the Civil War the congregation became a center of Loyal League, Radical Republican, and Freedmen's Bureau activity, and during the violent Reconstruction occupation of Jefferson the church was burned and members, including Albert Browning, were killed. Rebuilt in 1883 and rescued from demolition by restorers in 2003, it remains a cherished emblem of the community.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992

Founded by Marcus Garvey in 1917, the Universal Negro Improvement Association grew into one of the largest Black mass movements in American history. It championed racial pride, economic self-reliance, and a vision of independent nationhood in Africa, spreading its message through newspapers and chapters across the country. Its Philadelphia presence tied the city into a global network of Black activism.

New Orleans, LA

On June 24, 1973, a flash fire tore through the UpStairs Lounge, a second-floor bar in New Orleans' French Quarter that served as a gathering place for the city's gay community, killing thirty-two people in what was then the deadliest fire in the city's history. In the era's climate, many victims went unclaimed and some churches refused funerals, and the tragedy was met with public indifference or scorn. That silence, and the grief it failed to honor, helped galvanize an emerging movement for LGBT dignity and rights.

Village of Geneseo, NY

In the heart of Geneseo, a village in New York's Genesee Valley, this memorial honors local residents who died in military service. Like thousands of war memorials across America, it transforms an abstract national sacrifice into a roll of hometown names, gathered on the village green where the community still passes daily. Such monuments became common fixtures of American town centers in the wake of the World Wars, when nearly every community sought a lasting way to grieve and remember its fallen.

Baytown, TX

Victoria Taylor Walker climbed from a church-run school in Cedar Bayou to Prairie View College and back home to teach at the segregated Cedar Bayou Colored School in 1933, where she promptly won a full nine-month term and a safe water well for her pupils. For decades she taught children by day and adults by night, saw a school named in her honor, and after desegregation became the first Black teacher at previously all-white Stephen F. Austin Elementary. Goose Creek CISD later named yet another school for the educator who declared no one could love teaching more than she did.

Austin, TX

During World War II, segregation barred Black servicemen from most Austin restaurants and recreation, prompting local leaders to seek dedicated sites for soldiers on leave. Johnny Holmes answered that need, opening the original Victory Grill in a converted icehouse on East 11th Street to mark VJ Day in August 1945. Its Kovac Room became a celebrated stop on the "Chitlin' Circuit" of Black music venues, hosting blues and jazz until desegregation and changing tastes led to its 1973 closing; Holmes's children later reopened the landmark.

Lowndes County, AL

Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother who had come south to help, was killed on this Lowndes County road on March 25, 1965, as she ferried marchers during the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights campaign. Her death, coming amid one of the pivotal mobilizations of the civil rights era, drew national attention to the violence facing those who fought for Black Americans' right to vote. This memorial marks the place where she gave her life for that cause.

City of Niagara Falls, NY

In October 1910, the New York State Woman Suffrage Association gathered for its annual convention in the auditorium of the Shredded Wheat Biscuit Company in Niagara Falls — a fitting venue in a city built on the power of the falls and bold modern enterprise. Suffragists across the Empire State were then pressing toward the goal of the ballot, organizing, lobbying, and rallying public support. New York women finally won the right to vote in 1917, a pivotal victory on the road to the 19th Amendment, ratified nationally in 1920.

Westminster, MD

In the years before 1920, American women organized town by town to win the right to vote, and Westminster had its own champion in Mary B. Shellman. As founding president of the Carroll County Just Government League in 1913, she spent the decade rallying neighbors to the suffrage cause, and once the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 she turned to the practical work of teaching newly enfranchised women how to cast a ballot. This marker, part of the National Votes for Women Trail, stands where that grassroots civic education actually happened.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1995

In 1896 and 1897 the young scholar W.E.B. Du Bois lived in a Philadelphia settlement house while conducting the door-to-door research for "The Philadelphia Negro," published in 1899. That study was one of the first rigorous sociological portraits of an African American community in the United States. Du Bois went on to help found the NAACP and to become one of the most influential Black intellectuals and activists in American history.

Montgomery County, VA

In the rolling farmland of Montgomery County, Virginia, the community of Wake Forest grew from the descendants of people enslaved at nearby Kentland Plantation. This memorial honors those men, women, and children whose forced labor, skill, and endurance built and sustained the plantation through generations of bondage. After emancipation, freed families put down roots in the surrounding area, founding a lasting community that carried their memory forward.

Richmond, TX

Born into slavery in North Carolina in 1840 and brought to Texas around 1860, Walter Moses Burton learned to read and write from his enslaver and, after emancipation, bought land from that same man. He became a successful farmer and in 1869 was elected sheriff of Fort Bend County; in 1873 he won a seat in the Texas Senate, serving four terms for a multi-county district before returning to farming and local politics.

High Point, NC

Laid out and named in 1850, Washington Street grew into the beating heart of High Point's African American community. Through the long decades of segregation, its blocks filled with Black-owned businesses, churches, doctors' offices, theaters, and gathering places—a self-sustaining commercial and cultural district built when Jim Crow shut Black residents out of the white downtown. By 1960 it stretched across a broad swath of the city, a point of pride and independence forged in the face of discrimination.

Cotulla, TX

Designed by Austin architect Charles H. Page and completed in 1926, this classically inspired brick schoolhouse was named for County Judge G. A. Welhausen and served Cotulla's Hispanic students for many years. In 1928–29 a twenty-year-old Lyndon B. Johnson taught and served as principal here, an experience among poor Mexican American children that he later credited with shaping his commitment to education and civil rights. The building's central block, flanking wings, and decorative tile panels earned it recognition as a Texas Historic Landmark in 1990.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2020

Founded in 1820, "Big Wesley" was central to the birth of the A.M.E. Zion denomination and, at its first home, hosted anti-slavery gatherings in the decades before emancipation. The congregation has stood at this site since 1885, carrying its founding spirit into a long record of leadership in civil rights, equal employment, and social justice. It remains one of Philadelphia's historic African American churches.

Galveston, TX

Galveston's African American Methodist community reaches back to 1848, and after the Civil War the congregation that became Reedy Chapel A.M.E. spawned a lineage of churches — among them Wesley Tabernacle, organized out of a split in 1868. Its sanctuary survived fire in 1879 and the catastrophic 1900 hurricane, only to be rebuilt by a Black carpentry crew and later refaced in brick when the city's grade raising reached the neighborhood. Beyond worship, the church became a center of Black civic life and, in 1914, home to what is described as the first anti-lynching society in Texas.

Smithville, TX

In the segregated Jim Crow South, West End Park was one of the last Texas stops on the "Chitlin' Circuit" — the network of venues that offered Black performers safe, welcoming stages when white clubs were closed to them. Owned by former Negro Leagues pitcher I.T. Harper and his wife Sis, the park hosted jazz and blues greats like Etta James, T-Bone Walker, and Lightnin' Hopkins, while its baseball field drew exhibition games featuring Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. Between shows it served the community for church picnics, holidays, and family reunions.

New Braunfels, TX

Home from World War II in 1947, Felipe Delgado and his wife Elisa Saenz Delgado bought a lot in New Braunfels and built an entertainment center for the city's Hispanic community. Their dance hall drew concerts, weddings, and quinceañeras—Texas-Mexico border legend Lydia Mendoza sang here—while the grounds hosted boxing, a skating rink, carnivals, and a beloved baseball team, the West End Cardinals. Each September the park filled for Diez y Seis, marking Mexico's independence, until the hall was torn down in the 1980s.

Beeville, TX

As Beeville's Mexican American population grew, the school district in 1911 opened the segregated West Side School, moving it to a brick building at this site on Jackson Street in 1932. Mexican American students began integrating into A.C. Jones High School in 1938, a process aided in the 1940s and 1950s by the American G.I. Forum and LULAC, whose Texas court cases barred the segregation of Mexican American children — a parallel to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling for African American students. The building is remembered for the strong education students achieved despite unequal conditions.

Charleston, SC

In a cramped three-room house on a Charleston back lot, two brothers born into slavery began lives that would carry them to the front ranks of the fight for Black equality. Archibald and Francis Grimké were the sons of an enslaved woman, Nancy Weston, and grew up amid the hard aftermath of the Civil War before finding their way to Northern educations and national influence. Archibald became a lawyer, writer, and civil-rights leader, while Francis grew into one of the era's most respected ministers and moral voices. From this modest Charleston lot rose careers that shaped African American advocacy well into the 20th century.

Wharton, TX

Across Grove Street from the Wharton Cemetery lies this historic burial ground, the resting place of many of Wharton's early Hispanic families. The site was already in use before D.A. Dickson formally deeded 1.5 acres to the Mexican Cemetery Association in 1925, and from the 1920s to 1973 it was the city's only designated Hispanic cemetery—reflecting the era's segregated burial grounds for Hispanic, African American, and white residents. With more than 500 graves, some marked with Spanish inscriptions and some descended from the Canary Islanders who helped settle San Antonio, it stands as a rich chronicle of family and community.

Wharton, TX

Founded in 1896 as the Wharton Colored School, this institution served as the heart of African American education in Wharton County for nearly eighty years. In 1927 the county won a Rosenwald Fund grant to build a larger school, part of the philanthropic program that helped construct thousands of Black schools across the segregated South. Renamed the Wharton County Training School and steadily expanded with new buildings, science labs, and a full curriculum, it educated generations—many of whom returned as teachers—until it closed with integration in 1968.

Colfax, LA

This monument commemorates the white participants in the Colfax Massacre of 1873, when a white militia attacked and killed a large number of Black freedmen defending the Grant Parish courthouse during a disputed Reconstruction election. It was among the deadliest acts of racial violence in the Reconstruction era, and the Supreme Court case that grew from it, United States v. Cruikshank, gutted federal power to protect Black citizens' rights. The marker's own language — honoring men who fell 'fighting for white supremacy' — makes plain the Lost Cause worldview that later erected it.

Coatesville, PA · est. 2007

A 1924 Howard University graduate, Dr. Whittier C. Atkinson opened his practice in Coatesville in 1927 and in 1936 founded the Clement Atkinson Memorial Hospital, offering care to everyone regardless of their ability to pay. He broke barriers as the first African American president of the Chester County Medical Society and was named Pennsylvania Practitioner of the Year in 1960. His hospital stood as a rare place of open access in an era of segregated medicine.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2004

A prosperous Wilkes-Barre merchant, William Camp Gildersleeve turned his home and business into a refuge for freedom seekers, making him a central figure in the Underground Railroad of the Wyoming Valley. In 1853 he testified in a widely reported federal case arising from the shooting of a fugitive named William Thomas by deputy marshals—testimony that drew national notice, especially in African American newspapers. His public stand came amid the fierce national conflict over the Fugitive Slave Act.

Maysville, KY

William G. Kenton, a Maysville native, won election to the Kentucky House in 1969 and rose to become Speaker in 1976 at just 34 years old, serving in that role until his death in 1981. He was known for championing legislative independence—the effort to make the General Assembly a co-equal branch rather than a body dominated by the governor's office—and for opening state government to broader public participation. His service extended a family tradition of Kentucky lawmaking carried by his grandfather W.T. Kenton and great-grandfather Eldridge Kenton.

New Bern, NC

William Gaston served as a justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1833 to 1844 and was a leading lawmaker of the early republic. A Roman Catholic in an era of legal disabilities against them, he championed religious liberty for the state's Catholics. He also wrote the words to "The Old North State," later adopted as the official state song.

Swatara Township, PA · est. 1997

Born free in New York, the man honored here devoted his life to the fight against slavery, lecturing across the United States, Canada, and Britain on behalf of the enslaved and free Black communities. After the Civil War he settled in Harrisburg, edited a newspaper, and served as a leader in the A.M.E. Zion Church. In 1878 he broke a barrier by becoming the first African American elected to the city's school board, later serving as its president.

New York, NY

This monument honors William Jay Gaynor (1851–1913), who rose from a childhood in Oriskany, New York, to become a justice of the State Supreme Court and then mayor of New York City from 1910 to 1913. Gaynor was a reform-minded and fiercely independent figure in the Progressive Era, celebrated as a defender of civil liberties and honest government against the machine politics of his day. His tenure was cut short after he was wounded in a 1910 assassination attempt, and he died in 1913 while still in office. The inscribed motto — "Ours is a government of laws not of men" — captures the principle he championed from the bench and City Hall.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2013

William Lewis was a Philadelphia lawyer and judge whose convictions helped end slavery in his state at the dawn of the republic. He played a key role in drafting and passing Pennsylvania's 1780 Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery — the first such law in America — and spent his life defending the freedom it granted, serving as counsel for the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. His elegant summer home, Strawberry Mansion, built in 1789, still stands as a reminder of the man.

Boston, MA

This statue on Boston's Commonwealth Avenue Mall honors William Lloyd Garrison, the fiery editor who launched his antislavery newspaper The Liberator in the city in 1831 and demanded the immediate, unconditional end of American slavery. The words carved here — "My country is the world; my countrymen are mankind" — were the masthead creed of that paper, a deliberate rebuke to a nation that tolerated human bondage. Reviled and even mobbed in his own day, Garrison spent three decades insisting the enslaved were owed freedom now, not by gradual compromise. By the time he died in 1879, emancipation had vindicated the cause he had championed almost alone at its start.

Fort Worth, TX

Born in Kaufman County in 1866, William "Gooseneck Bill" McDonald entered politics in 1890 and rose to lead the "Black and Tan" faction of the Texas Republican Party, prized for his ability to unite Black and White voters. He served as a delegate to numerous state and national conventions and was a Black Masonic leader for 47 years. After moving to Fort Worth in 1906 he founded the Fraternal Bank and Trust Company and became a leading civic figure.